


Travelers

by aeli_kindara



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 14:39:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18662413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: In which Steve and Bucky discuss what Steve plans to do.





	Travelers

**Author's Note:**

> T for language and some mention of Bucky's past traumas. Steve/Bucky is not explicitly stated, though certainly implied.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

It’s in the chaos after the battle, the funerals, the cleanup, that Bucky learns Steve and his friends have figured out how to time travel.

The knowledge, when he summons it, arrives in hot and cold waves. Bucky’s traveled through time often enough: in the cryo chamber, the Smithsonian, in nightmares. Now, as dust, reassembled five years and a heartbeat after he felt his rifle fall from a crumpling hand. He doesn’t like that, and he doesn’t like this, and that might be why it takes him so long to finally swallow down the bile of his distaste long enough to ask and learn more.

They’re sitting around the coffee table at Steve’s Brooklyn apartment, drinking wine in almost-silence at 1am. Banner’s back in Manhattan, at his own place, and Sam went to bed hours ago with the excuse that he doesn’t have any supersoldier serum to substitute for his beauty sleep. Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow, the work of grieving ends, and rebuilding begins.

Steve’s taking the infinity stones back through time, tomorrow.

Mjølnir is resting on the floor by his knee, as it usually is these days. Bucky eyes it, gleaming in the lamplight, and asks, finally, “So what’s it like? Time travel?”

If the question surprises Steve, he doesn’t show it. He talks, instead: about the Battle of New York. About standing in an elevator with men he knew were HYDRA, and pretending to be one of them. Fighting himself on a bridge and using Bucky’s name to win. Going back further, to Camp Lehigh this time —  _ it was so strange, Buck, I remember it from the ‘40s and then again when it was abandoned, but never like this _ .

He talks about watching Tony Stark reunite with his unknowing father. About watching the emotion in his eyes.

Then he stops, mouth soft and tense, and Bucky waits, because Steve isn’t done.

“Buck, I — I saw her.” He ducks his chin, looks up sideways like he’s scared of the word.

Bucky says it for him. “Peggy.”

Steve’s hands flex where they’re clasped. He nods, and looks away.

“Well?” When Steve glances up again, reluctant, Bucky raises his eyebrows, tilting him a significant stare. “How’d she look?”

He tunes it right: just bald enough, just this side of lecherous, and the words crack Steve’s shell of misery. He laughs, shifting his weight on the chair, then lets his head hang from his neck as he says, half muffled, “Good. She looked good. She —”

He stops.

“Did she see you?”

A head-shake. “There was a photo of me, on her desk. Me at boot camp, before I — well, you know.”

Bucky fucking  _ knows. _

“I have to go back there.” Steve’s voice is breaking. “To return the Tesseract. And I don’t know how I — how I can —”

Jesus  _ fucking  _ Christ. The answers have been aching to burst out of him, and now they run roughshod through Bucky’s mind, choking him:  _ Let someone else do it. You don’t have to be the big damn hero. You can take a goddamn break for once in your life, Rogers. _

Except that Steve would say he’s taken a break, a five-year break, for all Bucky knows it’s bullshit. Steve also talks about volunteering with the fire department. Police department on Wednesdays, VA on Saturday mornings. Therapy groups ten times a week. Steve wouldn’t know a “break” if it punched him in the goddamn nuts.

“— walk away from her again, Buck, I just  _ can’t. _ ”

Bucky blinks.

“Then don’t,” he says.

Steve goes very still.

After a moment, his hands drop from his face. His eyes are rimmed with pink, even though they’re not wet. “What?”

_ A goddamn break, pal. _ “Don’t. You owe her a hello.”

Protests flicker across Steve’s face like shadows, but they go unvoiced. “And a dance,” he murmurs instead, almost wondering, then — “you’ll come with me?”

Bucky slides back in his seat, shaking his head.

“Buck.” Steve’s straightening, looking at him properly. His eyes are wide blue and wounded. “I’m not — I won’t  _ leave _ you here.”

“Yeah. You will.” His voice comes out rough.

“No.”

Bucky shakes his head again, mute. How can he make Steve see this? He’s spent too long unmoored, opening his eyes long enough for a few breaths of history only, spun out and drawn tight between Steve and nothing at all. He needs — he  _ needs _ to stay here, with what’s left of the Avengers, with Shuri and T’Challa and Okoye, with Sam. To place his hands on the future and try to shape it for good.

Steve’s never had his chance at the past. Bucky has: visited his museums and filled up his notebooks, word after painful word. Steve’s waited, while Bucky did what he had to do, the years of remembering and the years and years of blood.

He’s ready to do some waiting of his own.

Just a little.

“Five seconds,” he rasps, out loud. “You’ll come back. In all of five seconds, for me.”

Steve is watching him closely. “And if it’s longer on my end? If I’m — different?”

Bucky can’t help himself; he scowls. With every ounce of wordless sarcasm he can muster, he levels a finger at Steve: all six feet of him, the bulging all-American muscles and the god-hammer at his feet. At himself, long-haired and metal-armed, a man scraped to life from a ghost.

Steve’s laughing; the best sound Bucky knows, in this life or any other. “All right, all right. I take your point.”

“Five seconds,” Bucky threatens. “One way or another. Otherwise I’m coming after you.”

“Five seconds,” Steve echoes. “Understood.”

It’s decided, Bucky thinks. But Steve’s watching him still, and when he says, “I’ll miss you,” it’s so quiet it’s almost lost in the distant rumble of a truck's engine, far below.

There’s something small and tender and aching in Bucky’s chest, where there always has been. It drinks in the words and squeezes them tight. “I’ll miss you,” he agrees, sober, because he’ll miss years of Steve, most likely; he’ll miss decades.

Steve nods like he understands.

“You know,” he says softly, “that there might be another you back there. Somewhere.”

_ Don’t look for me. Don’t look for me, don’t find me, I’m happy where I am, I’m done.  _ If Steve changes something —

But it doesn’t work that way, Banner says. The past can’t hurt them. Not like that, at least.

“If you let him kill you,” he says instead, “I’ll find Carter and we’ll both come kick your ass. Into the nineteenth century. I swear to God.”

Steve’s eyes smile, then his mouth. “I’ll see you in the nineteenth century, then. Or tomorrow.”

“Make it tomorrow,” Bucky advises. “I’ve got no time for chasing you around history. Me and Sam have shit to do.”

Steve’s smile widens. His eyes dance with some secret not yet told.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I guess you do.”


End file.
